By Tom:
It’s hard to know exactly where to push your resources when you’re starting a business. One of the things we’ve been low-key with to-date is trying to get press coverage. It’s not because we don’t want to be noticed, but because we’ve wanted to ‘make it happen’ before we shout from the rooftops. Perhaps we’ve missed a trick, but so far we haven’t pushed to hard to promote ourselves, relying instead on recommendations and our networks.
In the last week we’ve started to open our doors a little and send out a few press releases and we’re really happy to have been ‘spotted’ by Forbes today. It’ll be good to see what difference this proactivity will have.
From a personal standpoint, I’ve always felt that there is real power in the understated approach, which is embodied by our friends Sawdays, for example, who have always relied on doing things ‘right’ as opposed to investing time and money on PR, which in turn has resulted in excellent publicity. Nonetheless, it is important to reach those people who you may not have direct contact with and some entrepreneurs, such as Branson and Stelios and some companies, for example Innocent Drinks, use their profile to excellent effect with the media.
I’ll be really interested to see how our/my attitude pans out over time!